Stubborn hope
Text 1: Bulbs, by Winifred Askew
An original novel extract.
The bomb that took the Pearsons’ house had taken Ivy Marsh’s back wall with it, and the greenhouse, and the apple tree her father had planted the year she was born. For three winters the garden had been a slope of broken brick and nettles, with a bath standing in the middle of it on its claw feet, full of rainwater and sky.
In October she cleared one square yard. It took her a fortnight of evenings, kneeling on a folded sack, prising out lumps of plaster and lath with a coal shovel and a kitchen fork. Mrs Dunn from next door watched over the fence with her arms folded.
“What’s the use, Ivy?” she said. “They’ll be pulling the whole row down, you mark my words. And if they don’t, the next lot will.”
Ivy did not answer. She had a paper bag of tulip bulbs, bought from a barrow in Lambeth for more than she could spare, and she was setting them in the cleared earth one at a time, pointed end up, six inches apart, exactly as her father had shown her. There had been no letter from Harry since the spring. The War Office said missing, which was not the same as the other word, and she said it to herself sometimes at night, missing, missing, as if it were a small hard thing she could hold in her fist.
She pressed the earth down over the last bulb with the flat of her hand. Around her the ruined gardens of the street lay grey and silent under a sky the colour of dishwater. Nothing would show for months. She knew that. That was the point of bulbs: you put them in the dark and you went away and you did not dig them up to see.
Text 2: Forty Words, by Leyla Sorensen
An original short story extract.
Every morning before breakfast, Darius sat on the edge of the lower bunk with the dictionary on his knees and learned forty words. Not thirty-nine. Not forty-one. Forty, because that was the number he had decided on, in the first week, when he had arrived at the hostel knowing only hello, thank you, and football.
The dictionary was secondhand, from the charity shop near the bus station. Somebody before him had owned it and had underlined words in green ink, words like anxious and permit and appeal, and sometimes Darius wondered who that person had been and whether they had been allowed to stay. He used a pencil, so as not to spoil it, and put a tiny tick beside each of his forty.
His roommate, Yonas, who was older and had been waiting for his decision for nineteen months, watched him from the top bunk.
“Why do you do this?” he said, in their shared bad English. “Maybe they send you back. Then all these words, for nothing.”
Darius did not look up. He was on the letter G. Garden. Garment. Gate. Gather.
“If they send me back,” he said, “I know forty words more.”
Yonas laughed, not unkindly, and turned over to face the wall. Darius went on. Gaze. Generous. Gentle. He said each one under his breath, three times, and then he closed his eyes and spelled it in the air with one finger, as if he were writing it on the inside of a window.
Outside, the letterbox in the hall rattled, and every head in the corridor lifted at once, the way it did every morning. Darius kept his finger on the page and did not get up. He had nine words left.
‘In both texts, hope is presented as an act of stubbornness.’
How far do you agree with this statement?
In your answer you should:
Support your response with quotations from Text 1 and Text 2.
40 exam-style questions on OCR GCSE English Language 3.3.4 Interpret meanings and effects across texts. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.